On Tuesday 19 March, final interviews were held for one of the biggest – and currently most exposed and controversial – jobs in British cultural life: director of the British Museum. But according to several people close to the process, the trustees on the selection panel had been instructed by No 10 to do something rather peculiar.
Instead of informing the prime minister of their decision on the new director in order for it to be formally ratified, as is customary, they had instead been told to supply Rishi Sunak with two names: a small menu, in other words, from which he or his stand-ins, based on zero knowledge of the needs of the museum, would choose. This at a time when, scarred by the “inside job” theft of 1,500 items from its collection, and amid complex rumbling arguments about restitution, the last thing the British Museum needs is to be made a political pawn.
To do him credit, the British Museum’s chair, George Osborne, reportedly told No 10 to get stuffed, in slightly politer terms. The trustees’ choice was the current director of the much smaller, less complex National Portrait Gallery, Nicholas Cullinan, whom one can only wish well in the task that lies ahead of remaking an institution that has been plunged into scandal, has a £1bn redevelopment in the offing, in which internal morale has been incredibly low, and whose place in the world requires fresh articulation.
No 10’s demand was the latest in a long line of attempted assaults on the independence of public institutions. The British Museum is not an arm of the state, or a plaything of politicians. It was founded in 1753 to be an independent body answerable not to the government, but to the people, through our elected representatives in parliament. It is funded by, but sits at “arm’s length from”, government, as the official phraseology has it.
It is this principle of arm’s length that has been, over the past century and more, at the heart of protecting British institutions, especially cultural bodies such as the BBC, national museums and Arts Council England, from direct political pressure. In the case of the Arts Council – which was shaped into its current form during and after the second world war by the economist John Maynard Keynes, with the aim of bringing the arts to everyone in postwar Britain – the need for this political independence was obvious. One had only to look at what had happened in Europe’s fascist states, where it was abundantly clear that the suppression of free cultural expression was tightly bound up with the suppression of political freedom. At a time when disturbing political tides are breaking again, in Europe and beyond, it should not be hard to see why the independence of cultural bodies is a principle worth fiercely protecting.
And yet the current government has, time and again, pushed against this principle, especially through the way in which public appointments are made by supposedly independent panels. Perhaps the most egregious examples are the ultimately failed attempts under Boris Johnson’s prime ministership to insert the former editor of the Daily Mail, Paul Dacre, as chair of the media regulator Ofcom, and the former editor of the Telegraph Charles Moore as chair of the BBC – most obviously by a leak to the press that these names represented the prime minister’s preferred candidates, a move probably designed to deter serious alternatives from applying.
It would be wrong to say that Labour, or earlier generations of Tories, had never tried to influence public appointments. There are many stories of chairs of institutions being told it would be “very helpful” were such-and-such a grandee, having outlived their usefulness elsewhere, be given a role as a trustee. But in recent years this kind of practice has effloresced into a campaign to pervert the integrity of processes, amounting to a habitual corruption of public life.
Often these cases do not come to public light, taking the form of appointments subtly but fatally weakened. More than one person has told me that under Boris Johnson the social media accounts of candidates for positions on boards were raked through, with anti-Brexit positions seen as a red flag. In Johnson’s No 10, the Tory fixer Dougie Smith and longtime Johnson adviser Munira Mirza were in charge of trying to ensure figures friendly to the government ended up in public positions – such was the deep paranoia about the supposed “cultural Marxism” raging through museums and other organisations. Remainers, it seemed could not be trusted to leave their politics at the door – though figures such as Dacre and Moore could.
Take Mary Beard. The government vetoed her as a trustee of the British Museum when her name was put to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (now the Department for Culture, Media and Sport) for sign-off in 2020. She had been through an appointments process, and indeed, it is hard to think of anyone better qualified for the role – but she had expressed pro-Europe views in public. Fortunately, out of the 25 seats on its board, five may be appointed without any reference to the government, so the trustees simply went ahead and appointed her themselves.
The BM is not the only museum that has been at the sharp end of such interference. In 2021 Charles Dunstone, the billionaire founder of TalkTalk and no woke warrior, resigned as chair of the National Maritime Museum after one of his most valued trustees, the academic Aminul Hoque, was rejected by the DCMS for a normally automatic second term. At the time, Dunstone told me that officials had pointed out to him that Hoque had “liked” tweets hostile to the government.
“There’s been an increasing politicisation of the nominations to the boards of museums and galleries. And that seems to me to be a shame because I think the criteria for selection should be their suitability for being on the board and the contribution they can make to the museum or gallery,” Mark Jones, the interim director of the BM, said when I asked him about trustee appointments. (He emphasised that this was his personal view, and not the BM’s.) The highly respected Jones, who stepped in temporarily last autumn after the resignation of the previous director over the thefts, is careful and diplomatic. He calls it a shame; others might call it a scandal.
This creeping corruption has got to stop. It’s another item on Labour’s lengthy to-do list: reassert the integrity and independence of Britain’s cultural institutions. Happily, this one costs no money, and comes with a considerable payoff.
Charlotte Higgins is the Guardian’s chief culture writer
